For those of you interested in innate aspects of narrative, the serious book
is

Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (Oxford University Press
1996).

"Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our
experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. The
mental scope of story is magnified by projection -- one story
helps us make sense of another. The projection of one story onto another
is parable, a basic cognitive principle that shows up everywhere,
from simple actions like telling time to complex literary
creations...."
"A two-year-old child who is leading a
balloon around on a string may say, pointing to the balloon, "This
is my imagination dog." When asked how tall it is, she says,
"This high," holding her hand slightly higher than the top of
the balloon. "These," she says, pointing at two spots just
above the balloon, "are its ears." This is a complicated blend
of attributes shared by a dog on a leash and a balloon on a string. It
is dynamic, temporary, constructed for local purposes, formed on the
basis of image schemas, and extraordinarily impressive. It is also just
what two-year-old children do all day long. True, we relegate it to the
realm of fantasy because it is an impossible blended space, but such
spaces seem to be indispensable to thought generally and to be sites of
the construction of meanings that bear on what we take to be
reality." [p. 114] Order from amazon.com.

There are four books that illustrate the traditional formula for preteen readers
(and are so well written as to prove wildly popular with adults):